M.G. Piety is an associate professor of philosophy at Drexel University. She has published articles on topics such as applied ethics and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in scholarly journals and books. She has also published essays and articles on art, sports, and social-political issues in publications such as The Rockhurst Review, Counterpunch, The Smart Set, and The Times Literary Supplement.

The first thing I have against marriage is that, were my husband home now, I would not be writing this essay. I would probably just now be starting to prepare dinner. I would not have been able to read the article in the New Yorker that prompted the reflections I have decided to record here. If I had been so fortunate as to have finished the chores that are usually assigned to me because my husband is in the throes of a job search, and if I thus had time to leaf through the New Yorker, my husband would have deemed such behavior on my part “anti-social” and an indication that I have lost all interest in him and am planning to leave him.

My husband is brilliant, handsome, and enormously talented. He is a good person. He does not like to see animals suffer, though his own mother related to me that, when she once dropped her comb in his bathroom and had to bend over to pick it up, she nearly passed out from the ammonia fumes that emanated from the cat litter box he never cleaned. He loves me, but he is unable to reform his habit of depositing his clothes in piles when he removes them, rather than putting them in one of the many hampers I have provided for that purpose (though these piles, which make it difficult to navigate our apartment, have many times reduced me to tears). He is well educated, with an A.B. from Dartmouth and a J.D. from Boalt Hall College of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, but he is incapable of sending even an e-mail without having first subjected it to my scrutiny. He is creative, but appears uninterested in the fact that, though we met in a writing group, my own creative efforts have ceased almost entirely since we have been married. He knows I lived for three years in an apartment with no hot water, but insists he has abandoned his own creative ambitions in order to make more money for me because, as he insists, that is what I need to be happy.

He is a fabulously talented cook, yet the only time he cooks is when we have guests. He now, after much pleading and cajoling, washes dishes, but he still does not know how to put them away. So if there are dishes draining from an earlier wash, he will simply pile the freshly washed, and thus dripping dishes on top of these dry ones. It will go without saying to the married women reading this that he does not know how to sweep the floor (though one would think that someone with his keen analytical mind could figure that out, even if he had never seen it done). He does not know where the mop is, or, for that matter, the toilet paper or paper towels.

Now, of course, when I lived, for that brief and blissful period, alone, I had to do all the sweeping and mopping myself, as well as all the replacing of the paper towels and toilet paper. The difference is that I was not sweeping up after someone else, not mopping up the mud that someone else had tracked into the house oblivious to the fact that it would need to be mopped up. I replaced the paper towels or toilet paper when I had used the last sheet. I was never called to replace them by someone else who had himself used the last sheet but who could not be bothered to remember where the new rolls were kept because he was in the throes of a job search. (I managed to remember this, as well as when the cat litter needed to be cleaned and whether I was out of cream, even when I was in the throes of a job search.)

Some readers are undoubtedly clucking to themselves that the fault in this relationship is really mine, that I am allowing my husband to get away with too much, that I am not being sufficiently firm with him. My suspicion, however, is that these women are either sadistic, self-help authors, single, or young enough that their husbands came from households where the mother worked and where they thus learned, to a certain extent, to fend for themselves.

I have tried being firm with my husband. I have shown him where all the household items are kept. Not merely have I asked him to occasionally cook dinner, but I’ve also pointed out to him that I should not really have to ask. I have repeatedly complained about his habit of throwing his clothes on the floor. I have bought him hampers, enrolled him in a speed-cleaning course, and even periodically collected his clothes from where they lay about the house and deposited them in great lawn and garden bags. I have broken down in tears, suggested marriage counseling, and even threatened to leave, but have seen no progress in his domestication.

I have turned into the secretary, housekeeper, bookkeeper, therapist, teacher, and personal assistant. I was a philosopher and a poet. I collected art, rollerbladed, and enjoyed the attentions of countless attractive and interesting men of all ages. Now I teach philosophy, but have no time really to think, let alone to write poetry. The apartment to which we have temporarily relocated for the duration of my husband’s “visiting” professorship is too small to display my art collection. So much of my time is now taken up with the new commute to my own job that I hardly have time to do a yoga video, let alone spend an afternoon rollerblading in the sun (and enjoying the admiring glances of the many men that I am not now supposed to notice or else my husband will think I am planning to leave him).

My point here is that my situation is not unique. You are reading this because it is disturbingly similar to your own situation or to the situation of someone you know. If you are a man, you fear that I am your wife and you are searching for clues, not as to how you can reform your behavior to make me happy, but as to whether I am about to leave you.

This, you see, is the best kept of our cultural secrets: Men are not out to get beautiful young things for whom they ditch their long-suffering wives. Men cause their wives to suffer until they simply cannot stand it anymore and leave on their own, at which point, if the men are lucky, they secure a naive young woman who does not know what marriage will be like and who is thus willing to undertake it. I cannot imagine doing it again. I might find the proposition somewhat more attractive if my future spouse and I could maintain separate residences, but even then I cannot escape the fear that he would be ringing my doorbell at all hours of the night asking me if I had an extra roll of toilet paper or if I would mind looking over the abstract of a paper he was hoping to present at a conference in a few months. I am fairly confident that he would keep a close eye on who entered and left my place and that he would complain vociferously if any of my guests happened to be men between sixteen and sixty-five, particularly if they were attractive or wealthy.

No, I love my husband very much, but if this marriage does not endure, I do not think anything but abject poverty could convince me to do it again. Even then I would be gambling that I could better endure the anonymity of the overworked and under-appreciated wife than abject poverty, and that is indeed a gamble because the indifference of a loved one can be exponentially more painful than the indifference of a total stranger.

Poverty is, of course, one reason why women marry. Men are still paid better than women in our culture, and that encourages many women to think they will be better off married than single. And some indeed are better off if the criteria are merely financial. I’ve been poor and single and upper-middle-class and married and I’d take poor and single any day. It’s amazing how spacious a one-room apartment can seem if the floor is not littered with someone else’s clothes. A glass of cabernet tastes just as delicious, if not more so, while reading a piece in the New Yorker as it does when it is washing down someone else’s anxious musings on whether his left-wing political views will sabotage his chances of getting a job at a particular law school in Mississippi.

Men think that all women are interested in is money. That’s because they make their wives miserable and so the wives then turn to exploiting the only real compensation that their new conjugal status gives them i.e., a second income. A happy woman does not care about clothes or jewels or social status. A woman whose husband treats her as if she is a fascinating and precious creature about whom he simply cannot know enough and who keeps him in a perpetual state of sexual thrall will be happy shopping in thrift stores and eating off cracked china for the rest of her life.

I am well aware, of course, that marriage is, as they say, a two-way street. I fear I seldom treat my husband anymore as if he is a fascinating and precious creature about whom I cannot know enough. And that is not simply because I cannot imagine knowing more about him than I already do, given as he is to sharing not merely his every hope, but also his every neurotic fear and phobia with me independently of whether I am in the mood to share them. It is also because I am filled to the brim with anger and resentment toward him because he has made almost no discernible progress in reforming his behavior in ways that I have repeatedly emphasized to him are important to me. He seems to think that I should be content either to navigate my way through his piles of clothes and books and unopened mail, or to put his things in order myself. And I have to confess that I am not happy with either of these alternatives. Frankly, I think that even if my needs were eccentric, even if I insisted, for example, that I simply could not live in a house where there were not always fresh flowers and where there was not always baroque music wafting through the air, he should, as a considerate husband, accede to my wishes and systematically replace wilted flowers and push the “play” button on the CD player when the music stopped.

My wishes are not eccentric, however. They are perfectly normal. I want the majority of the mail collected in one place and periodically disposed of. I want dirty clothes to be placed in clothes hampers or laundry bags, and I want my husband periodically to shop and cook dinner on his own. That he does not yet seem able to do these things has created an enormous well of resentment in me that has not only severely curtailed my interest in tracing with him the path of his often neurotic self-exploration, it has almost entirely destroyed my sex drive (or at least my desire to have sex with him). He complains that I don’t like listening to him anymore (a complaint which is itself very revealing, since it is not, after all, that I do not like talking to him, but that I do not like listening to him). He also complains that I never want to have sex with him. I fear that in this instance, I must admit that he is correct.

He is not a bad person. He just doesn’t know how to live with someone, and in this respect he is not really so different from most men in our culture. Living harmoniously with a loved one is very difficult indeed. It requires extraordinary emotional maturity, wisdom, and fortitude, and very little in our culture encourages the development of these qualities. In fact, there is much in our culture that suggests we do not even know they exist. Women bear the brunt of this cultural deficiency, I’m afraid, because women are still largely taught to navigate the practical difficulties of running a household, so this responsibility tends to fall on them when they marry. Yet it is seldom appreciated by men who have not been taught that households do not run themselves. Women, who now, almost without exception, are holding down a job in addition to running a household, are still adjured to fix their hair and make-up before their husbands get home (which for many would mean risking their lives because they would be doing it behind the wheel of a car on their way home from the grocery store where they had to stop on their way home from work because their husbands are unaware that the refrigerator does not itself produce food). Yet husbands are not adjured to make sure they deposit their dirty clothes in a hamper designed for that purpose.

Statistics show that women fare much better after divorce than men, and many women will tell you that this is because their former husbands nearly starved to death (or nearly bankrupted themselves eating in restaurants) before they succeeded in finding another woman who was naive enough to embark upon a matrimonial journey with them. Women are happier after divorce so why do books like Rachel Greenwald’s Find a Husband After Thirty-Five Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School keep appearing on bookstore shelves, and why do women keep buying them?

Perhaps it is difficult to find a husband after thirty-five. Perhaps I was just extraordinarily “lucky” to have found my husband at forty. It didn’t seem terribly difficult to me though. Men seemed to me to be coming right out of the woodwork after I left my lover of eight years and found myself suddenly unattached at thirty-eight. I met men everywhere, attractive, interesting men! Men would strike up conversations with me in lines at the post office, in lines at bookstores, in lines at the pharmacy. They would talk to me in buses and restaurants. I met men at work. I met men at the library. They were everywhere! Half of humanity is male, you know, and none of them really is suited to be married, so you can’t complain there aren’t many “good ones” out there. If that is what you mean by “good,” then there aren’t any good ones out there, and to lament that fact is kind of pointless, isn’t it? From their perspective there aren’t any good women either. Sure there are attractive ones, smart ones, ones who can cook, ones with a healthy and uninhibited sexual appetite. But none of them, I can tell you now, not a one of them will be happy and fulfilled spending the rest of her life picking up after a man who can’t pick up after himself, cooking for a man who either can’t or won’t cook unless the spirit (which is different from the stomach) moves him. There is not a woman out there who wants to become a live-in therapist to a man who really needs one, or for whom an occasional movie or piece of jewelry is a satisfactory substitute for passion and tenderness. That is the kind of woman men really want though, at least as a wife. How disappointed, even cheated, a man must feel when he discovers he has married a real live, flesh-and-blood woman who could not care less what kind of car her husband drives so long as he does his own laundry and reads her poetry aloud to anyone who will listen.

I love to play house. I like to make a fancy dinner for a man, complete with an excellent wine and a decadent dessert. Afterward, I like to make mad, passionate love to him, or to allow him to make it to me (or better yet, to take turns) for several hours (it used to be all night but several hours is all my advancing age will allow) and then fall blissfully asleep. I like to get up the next morning, put on my fetching silk nightgown and robe and make a big fancy breakfast including eggs and bacon and fried potatoes and onions and homemade biscuits or cinnamon rolls. Sometimes I even do croissants and cappuccino. I don’t mind if he lingers on a while after breakfast. If we have sex again, I’ll even let him take me to lunch. I get annoyed, however, if it appears that he expects me to whip up lunch myself, and by the next evening I’m usually tired of company. I’ve been known to spend several days at a stretch with a man. I’ll even cook breakfast twice in row. Never dinner though. If we ate dinner together two nights in a row, then one of these nights was invariably at a restaurant. This seemed to me only right and proper. I never cooked dinner for someone else twice in a row until I was married.

Playing house is fun for both parties. Living it, however, is pure drudgery. I have now cooked dinner for someone else so many nights in a row that I could not begin to count them, and would not want to begin even if the objective were merely to elicit someone else’s sympathy. The very thought of the seemingly endless series of meals I have prepared fills me with a melancholy that I fear would defeat even the pharmaceutical industry. The situation is not really much better for my husband either. He rarely has to cook dinner, it’s true, but instead of the smiling, captivating dinner companion who captured his heart, he now has a surly, hostile one.

The Danish word for married is gift which, interestingly, is also Danish for poison. A Danish friend of mine, who has lived happily now for many years with the father of her three children in what the Danes refer to as a paperless marriage, is fond of saying that “gift is something one takes, not something one becomes.”

Marriage is really a horrible institution. It would be an imposition on those who might actually be suited to it, if they existed, and to everyone else it is hell. How many good marriages do you know? And by “good” we are setting the bar pitifully low because, admit it, the first thing that springs to your mind when you think of “good marriage” is a couple that does not hate each other. Two people who can live together for years without growing to despise each other are definitely to be admired and their marriage to be counted a success. I would not count my life a success, though, if my chief accomplishment was that I had avoided an evil. A life should be characterized by joy and passion and enthusiasm. If the most one can say of one’s life is that one does not hate it, I count it as a miserable failure. What kind of an institution is it whose criterion of success would be a criterion of miserable failure to almost anything else one applied it?

There is a movement afoot today to extend the institution of marriage to same-sex couples. Since it is well known that misery loves company, my suspicion is that this movement will succeed. It is being presented as a progressive political step and thus has many adherents on the left. Real progress, however, would involve the abolition of the institution entirely, not the spread of it to a hitherto uninfected population. Those on the right of the political spectrum profess to be opposed to this movement. My own suspicion, however, is that it actually originated with radical right-wing fundamentalists who are notorious for being unable to tolerate even the thought that somewhere, someone is actually enjoying himself. If marriage is holy, well then, by God, everyone ought to have to endure it!

Print This Article
Email (and more) with